What does 'enfant terrible' mean?
It's French for "terrible child". In English it describes a person, often a young artist or writer, who deliberately flouts convention and enjoys shocking respectable opinion. People usually mean it as praise for nerve and originality, though it can also be a mild dig at someone who courts scandal for its own sake. It's pronounced enfant terrible, and in English it's normally written without italics.
It fits a lot of the writers who got called that in their day, and it's a fair question whether it suits Murakami. Coin Locker Babies and Audition were built to unsettle, so readers who call him that are reacting to the violence and the moral vacuum in them, not to any stunt.
